Parmenides

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A chariot climbs a road no mortal walks, drawn by mares that know the way, and at its end a goddess takes a young man by the hand and tells him how things are. That is how the most austere argument in early Greek thought arrives — not as a proof set down in prose but as a revelation in epic verse, spoken by a deity to a traveler who has left the paths of ordinary men behind. The man who wrote it down, Parmenides of Elea, pressed a single thought further than anyone before him: that whatever truly is can neither come to be nor pass away, and that the whole shifting world of birth and change and death, the world everyone takes for real, is a thing the senses report and reason must refuse. It is the most uncompromising monism the ancient world produced, and the point at which Greek metaphysics first set reasoned argument flatly against the testimony of the eyes.

Roman-era portrait bust inscribed with the name of Parmenides, excavated at Velia (ancient Elea) — Sergio Spolti, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

When he lived is itself a matter of inference. The chronographer Apollodorus fixed his prime to the sixty-ninth Olympiad, around 504 to 501 BCE, by the schematic method the ancient biographers favored — pin a thinker’s “flourishing” to a datable public event and reckon his birth forty years before. Set against that is a scene in Plato, composed more than a century later: in the dialogue that bears Parmenides’ name, an old man of about sixty-five comes from Elea to Athens for the great Panathenaic festival, in the company of his pupil Zeno, and there falls into conversation with a Socrates still very young. If the meeting is taken as historical and the ages as deliberate, it places the encounter near 450 BCE and Parmenides’ birth around 515 BCE — the figure most modern scholars, following John Burnet, prefer, and the one the conventional notice carries. Whether Plato’s staging records a real visit or supplies a dramatic frame for a philosophical contest cannot be settled from the evidence; the dialogue is the man’s reception, not his biography. Either reckoning sets him in the western Greek world, at Elea — the colony on the Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy that the Romans would call Velia — where he is remembered as a lawgiver to his city as well as its philosopher.

The Greek colonies of Magna Graecia; Elea (Velia) lies on the Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy — Future Perfect at Sunrise, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The single poem

He wrote one work, and it was a poem. Where the Milesian inquirers before him and the philosophers after him reached for prose, Parmenides cast his account of reality in dactylic hexameter — the meter of Homer and Hesiod, the meter of revelation and of the gods — and the choice is not incidental. The argument comes clothed in the authority of inspired song, delivered in the mouth of a goddess, and the reader is made a listener at a disclosure rather than a follower of a demonstration. Later tradition gave the work the title under which the early physical treatises were filed, On Nature; the label is a convention, not Parmenides’ own.

The poem does not survive. What survives is roughly a sixth of it — perhaps a hundred and sixty lines out of an original that may have run to eight hundred — and it survives only because later writers quoted it. The opening, the chariot journey, comes down almost whole because Sextus Empiricus copied some thirty of its thirty-two lines into his attack on the dogmatists, apparently working from a Hellenistic anthology rather than a manuscript of the poem itself. The decisive central argument survives because the sixth-century commentator Simplicius, six hundred years later still, possessed a good copy and transcribed long stretches of it into his commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Heavens, expressly because — he says — the book had by his day grown rare and he wished to preserve it. Everything modern editors print is gathered out of such quotations, numbered in the system Hermann Diels established and Walther Kranz revised, where Parmenides occupies chapter twenty-eight and his verses are cited by the “B” numbers — B1 the proem, B8 the heart of the doctrine — that remain the common currency of the field. Every reconstruction of the poem’s order and sense is therefore a scholarly argument built on fragments, not a reading off a complete text.

The chariot and the goddess

The proem is the strangest thing in early philosophy and the part most fought over. A youth is borne along a road by mares straining at the chariot, escorted by the daughters of the Sun, who have left the halls of Night and thrown back their veils to light the way. They come to the gates where the paths of Night and Day divide, gates that the avenging Justice holds with alternating keys; the maidens coax her, the bars are drawn, the doors swing wide, and the chariot passes through into the daylight beyond. There a goddess receives the traveler kindly, takes his right hand, and begins the speech that fills the rest of the poem — telling him that it is right he should learn all things, both the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true conviction.

The goddess is never named. Commentators have proposed Persephone, the queen below; Justice, who opened the gate; Necessity, Themis, Wisdom, Nature — but the verse leaves her a bare thea, a goddess, and the silence is part of the design. What her revelation describes is a passage out of the ordinary into the certain: a journey beyond the beaten track to the place where things can be known as they are.

Here the readings divide, and the division goes deep. The dominant interpretation through the twentieth century took the proem as allegory — a literary investiture, in the manner of Hesiod meeting the Muses, dressing a strictly deductive metaphysics in the inherited garments of inspired poetry; the chariot ride is the mind’s ascent from confusion to insight, no more. Against this stands a minority current, argued most forcefully by Peter Kingsley, that reads the journey as the record of an actual descent — a katabasis into the dark, an incubatory passage of the kind practiced in the healing cults of Apollo and the underworld goddess, with Parmenides himself a healer-seer of the type the Greeks called iatromantis. Kingsley draws on inscriptions recovered at Velia that link the name to Apollo and to the medical guilds, and sets Parmenides in the same southern-Italian religious world as the Pythagorean brotherhoods, with their disciplines of purification and their interest in what survives the death of the body. The two readings yield two very different men — a logician in poet’s dress, or a priest of the underworld whose logic is the residue of a vision — and the fragments are spare enough to bear the weight of either. Foregrounded as a serious and much-debated possibility, the mystical reading is not the settled account; foregrounded as the obvious one, the deductivist reading underestimates how literally the poem means its own machinery. The text does not adjudicate between them.

The Way of Truth

The goddess sets out two roads of inquiry, and only two. There is the way that is — that it is, and that it cannot not be — and this is the path of conviction, for it attends upon truth. And there is the way that is not — that it is not, and that not-being must be — and this path, she warns, is one nothing can learn from, for what is not can neither be known nor spoken nor pointed at. One cannot think a nothing; the attempt collapses, because to think is always to think of something that is. A third route is worse than either: the road mortals stumble along with two heads, taking being and not-being to be the same and not the same, letting things come into existence and go out of it. That road is barred. From this the rest follows with the force of consequence.

What is — to eon, that-which-is, Being itself — cannot have come into being, for it would have had to come from what is not, and there is no such thing to come from, and no reason it should have stirred at one moment rather than another. By the same logic it cannot perish, cannot grow or diminish, cannot have a past in which it was not yet or a future in which it will be no more. So it simply is — not in time but all at once, entire, one, holding together without gap or seam. It cannot be divided, for there is no not-being to part it, no emptier and fuller region; it is everywhere alike, full of itself. It cannot move or change, for there is nowhere outside it to move into and nothing it could change into but what is not. It is complete, lacking nothing, and in a famous image the goddess likens it to the bulk of a well-rounded sphere, equal in every direction from the center — not because Being is a ball in space, but because it is balanced, finished, in want of nothing and nowhere more or less itself than anywhere else. These are the “signs” the poem hangs along the way: ungenerated and imperishable, whole and of a single kind, unshaking, complete.

One line from this section traveled further than any other. In the rendering scholars still argue over, the goddess says that the same thing is there for thinking and for being — that thought and what-is are not two separate orders but bound so tightly that there is no thinking of what is not, and so, in the end, no thought that is not thought of being. Whether the line asserts a strict identity of mind and reality or only their inseparability is contested in the Greek; what is not contested is its afterlife. It is a thought as far as possible from the world-ordering logos of his rough contemporary Heraclitus, who found the truth of things precisely in their ceaseless flux — the two of them framing, between Ephesus and Elea, the choice that the later tradition would spend itself trying to escape. It became one of the load-bearing texts of Neoplatonism: Plotinus cited it directly to ground the unity of thinker and thought in the second of his principles, the divine Intellect, where to know and to be are one act.

The Way of mortal Opinion

The poem does not end with truth. Having delivered the changeless One, the goddess turns and gives the youth a second account — the opinions of mortals, the ordering of the world as it appears — and warns in advance that there is no genuine conviction in it. This is the doxa, the Way of Seeming, and it is the part most lost to us. From the surviving lines it appears to have been a full cosmology built on two named forms, a bright fiery Light and a dense Night, out of whose mixture the heavens, the sun and moon, the ring-structure of the cosmos, and the workings of human thought were derived — an explanation of the very world the Way of Truth has just shown cannot truly be.

Why a philosopher who has proved that change is impossible should then narrate, at length, a world of change is the oldest puzzle in Parmenides. One reading takes the doxa as the best available account of a false appearance — false because it admits two forms where strict reasoning allows only one, but offered so the youth may know the deceptive scheme and not be overtaken by any mortal’s opinion. Another finds in it a positive cosmology Parmenides genuinely held for the phenomenal realm, demoted in rank but not discarded. Either way, the poem’s architecture enacts its own doctrine: truth is one and the way to it is narrow; opinion is plural, plausible, and everywhere, and it is where everyone but the initiate lives.

The school and its quarrels

The Porta Rosa at Elea-Velia, the home city of the Eleatic school — a paved street and stone arch of the 4th–3rd century BCE — Heinz-Josef Lücking, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

What Parmenides founded was not a doctrine others merely repeated but a method others were forced to defend. His pupil Zeno of Elea built a battery of paradoxes — the runner who can never reach the goal, the swift Achilles who never catches the tortoise, the arrow that at every instant stands still — not to prove anything of his own but to show that the common-sense world of motion and plurality, the world the doxa describes, dissolves into contradiction the moment it is pressed; if Parmenides’ One is absurd, Zeno answered, the many is more absurd still. Melissus of Samos took the doctrine in a different direction, recasting what-is as spatially unlimited and everlasting where Parmenides had bounded it like a sphere — a recasting that drew Aristotle’s scorn but kept the Eleatic insistence that being is one, full, and unchanging.

The challenge could not be ignored, and Greek philosophy after Parmenides is in large part a series of answers to it. Empedocles accepted that nothing comes from nothing or passes into nothing, and saved the appearances by making the unchanging “roots” many rather than one, mingled and parted by Love and Strife so that what looks like birth and death is only mixture and separation. The atomists made the same concession and split being into countless unchanging particles moving through a void — granting Parmenides his full being while smuggling back the not-being he had forbidden, now called empty space. Plato revered him above all his predecessors and called him, in the Theaetetus, both venerable and awful; in the Sophist he staged what he frankly named a parricide, doing violence to the father of Eleatic philosophy by forcing the admission that not-being, in the sense of difference, must after all be granted a place, or no false statement could ever be made. Aristotle treated the Eleatics as the immobilists to be refuted before physics can begin, but built his own metaphysics around an unmoved and unchanging first reality that owes more to Parmenides than the refutation admits.

Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511), the Renaissance image of the Greek philosophical tradition that Parmenides helped found — Raphael, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Fragments, editions, and the modern reading

Because the poem exists only in citation, the study of Parmenides is inseparable from the study of who quoted him and why. Sextus Empiricus, a skeptical doctor of the late second century CE, preserved the proem in the course of an argument the verses do not serve, which is partly why scholars trust it; Simplicius, a Neoplatonist of the sixth century, preserved the metaphysical core out of conscious antiquarian piety, and his commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Heavens remain the single richest source for early Greek philosophy as a whole. The standard reference numbering descends from Hermann Diels’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1903; revised with Walther Kranz), where the Parmenidean fragments became the canonical B-texts of chapter twenty-eight; the early Diels editions are in the public domain and the numbering universal.

The fullest modern critical edition in English is A. H. Coxon’s The Fragments of Parmenides (Assen, 1986; revised by Richard McKirahan, 2009), which prints the Greek with the testimonia, an apparatus, and a translation and commentary. The synoptic account most readers meet first is the Parmenides chapter of G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield’s The Presocratic Philosophers (second edition, Cambridge, 1983). The interpretive landscape — whether his “is” is the is of existence, of predication, or a fusion of both; whether the doxa is wholly false or a graded cosmology; whether the proem is allegory or initiation — is laid out without forced verdicts in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Parmenides and the survey at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Plotinian inheritance of his identity of thinking and being is set out in the same reference’s treatment of Plotinus. For the text itself the most direct route in the encyclopedia’s own holdings is sideways, through reception: the dialogue Plato named for him, in which the old Eleatic submits “the one” to a gauntlet of hypotheses, is hosted in the Jowett translation of Plato, and it was those hypotheses, read as theology rather than exercise, that the Neoplatonists turned into the ladder reaching toward the One beyond being — a One that is their construction and Plato’s, never Parmenides’ own term, his being always the plain participle, that-which-is. From his refusal to grant the divine any predicate that change could touch runs one strand of the long apophatic habit of reaching the first principle by stripping away, and his sphere of full, undiminished Being stands behind the later picture of a source that gives rise to all things by emanation without itself moving or being lessened. The Middle Platonist Plutarch, reading him centuries on, took care to insist that Parmenides had not, as careless readers supposed, abolished the world of the senses but only ranked it beneath the one reality that genuinely is.

The poem leaves its reader standing where the youth stands: handed two accounts by the same divine voice, one of a Being so complete it admits no day and no death, the other of the very world he must walk back out into, with its sun and its seasons and its mortal opinions in which there is no truth. The doctrine of the One that is does not abolish the world of seeming; it sets it permanently below the truth, plausible and pervasive and wrong, the place where everyone lives who has not made the journey the mares once made. To have come to the goddess is to have learned that the road one travels every day leads nowhere a thinker can rest, and that the only road that holds runs through a country with no births in it, no losses, and no change.

→ In the library: Plato, Parmenides (Jowett) — the dialogue that puts the aged Parmenides on stage and drills 'the one' through its hypotheses · Plato, Sophist (Jowett) — where the 'parricide' of Father Parmenides is staged to let not-being into speech

→ Related: Empedocles · Xenophanes · Heraclitus · Pythagoras · Plato · Aristotle · The One · Monism · Neoplatonism · Plotinus · Nous · Logos · Emanation · Apophatic Theology · Plutarch · Metaphysics